by Richard Wray
News of the meeting came as a court in Siberia yesterday threw out an appeal by BP's Russian joint venture, TNK-BP, against moves to take back the licence.
The spat over the £10bn field, which has reserves estimated to be large enough to supply the whole world for a year, has caused concern among oil analysts who see it as a further indication of the Russian government's desire to claw back assets owned by western companies.
Russia's environmental agency, RosPrirodNadzor (RPN), maintains that TNK-BP failed to hit its production targets. It was expected to produce an annual 9bn cubic metres of gas, but the regulator maintains that last year only 33.9m cubic metres was extracted.
The company blames the low production levels on a lack of government investment in local transport infrastructure, pointing out that even if more gas was produced it could not be delivered to customers outside the Irkutsk region.
It wants to build a pipeline to transport the gas to China, but Russia's state gas monopoly Gazprom has blocked the move. In fact the fight over Kovykta is seen by many analysts as a ruse to force BP to hand over control of the field to Gazprom. The deputy director of RPN, Oleg Mitvol, who has been vociferous about TNK-BP's failures, has shown no interest in TNK-BP's protestations about its failed Chinese pipeline saying the company should have been sure it had agreement for its plans.
"When the company [TNK-BP] signed its licence agreement, it had no guarantee from Gazprom. In the west, in any civilised country, you wouldn't sign an agreement without a 100% guarantee," he said earlier this year. RPN yesterday completed its inspection of TNK-BP's work at Kovykta and submitted its report to the Federal Subsoil Use Agency, Rosnedra, due to meet to discuss the issue on Friday.
"Our checks showed again that Kovykta is not complying with production terms," said Mr Mitvol yesterday. "We filed the documents to Rosnedra and it is now up to the agency to decide on the terms and timing of licence withdrawal."
TNK-BP is expected to continue to fight to keep its involvement in the field. A spokeswoman for the company said that the business that actually operates the field - Rusia Petroleum - will now lodge its separate appeal.
Blogalaxia Tags: Russia,China
